The SQL Server community is really engaged. They are an active bunch on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, they help each other on forums, they attend conferences. But that isn’t enough interaction – the community started a grass-roots effort Read More...

A new term - well, perhaps not that new - has come up and I’m actually very excited about it. The term is Data Scientist, and since it’s new, it’s fairly undefined. I’ll explain what I think it means, and why I’m excited about it. In general, I’ve found Read More...

Last week Microsoft announced several new offerings for “Big Data” - and since I’m a stickler for definitions, I wanted to make sure I understood what that really means. What is “Big Data”? What size hard drive is that? After all, my laptop has 1TB of Read More...

I got an e-mail from someone that has an interesting situation. He has 15,000 customers, and he asks if he should have a database for their data per customer. Without a LOT more data it’s impossible to say, of course, but there are some general concepts Read More...

Database Schemas are just containers – they aren’t users or anything else – think of a sub-directory on the hard drive. In early versions of SQL Server we “hid” schemas, placing all objects under “dbo”, which gave the erroneous perception that Schemas Read More...

I do a presentation (and a class) called "SQL Server for the Oracle DBA". It's a non-marketing overview that gives you the basics of working with SQL Server if you're already familiar wtih how Oracle works. This class and these links DO NOT help you with Read More...

Don’t be afraid of that title – I’m not talking about Six Sigma or anything super-formal here. In many organizations, there are more folks in other IT roles than in the Data Professional area. In other words, there are more developers, system administrators Read More...

I was working this weekend with a fairly simple Excel spreadsheet, and I had to decompose one cell in it out to three columns in a SQL Server table. There are tools within SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) that should be able to do that, but I just Read More...

Saturday I volunteered at a work-day at our church. Our building is one of the first buildings built in this area of Washington, so it’s a beautiful old structure, which of course means there’s lots of maintenance. I’m fairly decent with tools, I’ve done Read More...

I’m a big fan of code that writes code – most of the time. For instance, whenever you use the “templates” feature in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) or the Maintenance Wizard, you’re using code that writes other code. There’s even a trick of writing Read More...

I give series of classes and presentations on Data Design. I say “data” design instead of “database” design because we should consider more than just the database. Data might actually be stored in non-relational stores, such as Excel or XML files, and Read More...

Most data professionals I’ve met work in two modes: we plan for our day, and we react to the situations around us. I’m staring at my list of things that I need to do today right now, which is my planned work. Of course, I have no idea how much of that Read More...

As the Data Professional in your organization, the rest of the org looks to you to ensure that the system can handle what the business requires. To do that, you need to know two things: what the business requires, and what SQL Server can do. But of course Read More...

It’s not hard to get Performance Monitor counters in PowerShell 1.0, and it’s REALLY easy in 2.0. This is one I used yesterday to monitor network bytes in and out on 2.0 (keep all of the green lines in this post on the same line) : get-counter -Counter Read More...

OK – In SQL Server 2008 R2 we did “re-use” an acronym or two (DAC and DTA), but it’s important to remember there are actually two parts to this new feature. One is the Data Application Component (DAC) and the other is the Data Tier Application (DTA). Read More...